A journey from incredibly touching ad to horribly tone-deaf — Take 1: Lover On Nov 19, 2009, Google posted an ad to Youtube titled Parisian Love. It encapsulated all the emotional highs and lows of living with Google Search. It is one of tech’s best ads ever made. The beauty of this ad was that it was not presumptuous. It painted a…

The king of search cannot conquer critical thinking if instructors are willing to put in the effort. — The question of whether Google impacts the way people learn is as old as Google itself. Opinions about its pros and cons are in constant flux. Fantasizing about retreating into our luddite shells of looking up information in the library is not productive. …

How a tool intended to help my students became a gauge for my own performance — I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of assigning weekly journals in my class before. Despite preaching to my students every year that they should journal to bolster their learning capacity, I’d never formalized it as a learning tool within the course. …

Fancy online tools won’t take you far without a solid foundation — My online lecture on Creativity, Innovation, and Critical Thinking has more than 90 students enrolled this semester. Even before COVID-19, I was constantly searching for new ways to keep the class experiential for such a large group of students. When the university announced last year that the course would be…

How the added cognitive load of virtual workshopping tools impede learning — When I give a workshop in person, I don’t have to worry about whether people are familiar with the tools. Participants can focus on the activity, as the cognitive load required to use markers, Post-its, and whiteboards is minimal. …

How a new app that’s challenging existing video calling software reminded me of this potent cognitive bias — Last week, I tried a new video conferencing tool called Around created by a startup with the same name. …

An overview of the competing definitions for addressing AI’s challenges — There are a lot of people out there working to make artificial intelligence and machine learning suck less. In fact, earlier this year I joined a startup that wants to help people build a deeper connection with artificial intelligence by giving them a more direct way to control what algorithms…

The good, the bad, and nothing else. — After watching Seaspiracy, Netflix’s hotly debated documentary about the unsustainable practices of industrial fisheries, my mixed feelings about the limitations of the platform’s thumbs-based rating system were vividly revived. I found Seaspiracy to be sensationalist, highly biased, and in some cases factually problematic. (Since I’m not here to explain these…

Expanding social beyond social media. — Our current model for the social internet is destination-based. We have to stop what we’re doing, head to a social media app or site, then start sharing and interacting with others. Think of these social media sites as malls and every other website as independent shops and houses in a…